WARSAW – Secretary of State Rex Tillerson commemorated Jews who rose up against the Nazis during a trip to Poland Saturday — something President Trump failed to do when he visited the country.
“One of Poland’s greatest sons, Pope John Paul II, understood the face of evil when he said ‘No one is permitted to pass by the tragedy of Shoah,’” Tillerson said at the Monument to the Ghetto Heroes in Warsaw, where he laid a wreath on Saturday morning.
His comments, which marked International Holocaust Remembrance Day, came after Trump failed to go to the monument, something that every President in the last 30 years had done during their trips.
Trump’s choice to appear instead at a World War II monument to a later non-Jewish rebellion against the German occupiers for a July speech ignited a debate on Poland’s memory of the Holocaust and recent rightward drift.
Trump’s address referenced the Holocaust but repeatedly spoke of a nationalistic struggle of “civilization” that echoed some of the rhetoric of Law and Justice, a far-right anti-immigrant party.
“There is no question that the extreme right, which includes anti-Semites, feels supported by the government,” Michael Schudrich, an American who grew up on Long Island and has been Chief Rabbi of Poland since 2004, told the Daily News on Friday.
Schudrich, who co-signed a letter criticizing Trump’s July appearance, does not believe the government led by Polish President Andrzej Duda is anti-Semitic but said officials have been reticent in condemning prejudice among Duda’s supporters until recently.
Duda and others condemned racist and anti-Semitic displays at a November far-right march with 60,000 people that made international headlines as attendees paraded. Some demonstrators waved signs calling for a “white Europe of brotherly nations.”
The country was jolted again last week during a television report on Polish men going holding a secret celebration honoring the birthday of Adolf Hitler, whose Third Reich murdered six million Poles, including three million Jews.
Trump’s White House was also criticized one year ago by American organizations such as the Anti-Defamation League for failing to mention Jews in its statement on Holocaust Remembrance Day.
The White House statement put out this year did explicitly mention Nazis’ systematic persecution and brutal murder of Jews, and many in Warsaw welcomed Tillerson’s visit.
“It’s quite an important message, especially as President Trump did not come last time,” said Anna Chipczynska, the leader of the Warsaw Jewish Community who was with Tillerson at the monument on Saturday.
She told the Daily News at her office in the Nozyk Synagogue, the only one in Warsaw to survive the Nazi occupation and World War II, that the American President had showed a “lack of understanding” by bypassing the monument last year.
“The Warsaw Monument to the Ghetto Heroes is a tribute, landmark of the Jewish history, the history of Warsaw, but also in the wider sense to the history of human rights,” she said.
Accusations of racism against Trump have compromised the State Department’s ability to pressure Poland to address the rise of anti-Semitism here and across Europe, critics say.
Both Chipczynska and Schudrich were hopeful that attention to the November nationalist march was a turning point in the fight against anti-Semitism, with the rabbi praising the launch of a new task force from the Ministry of Education on how to teach about the Holocaust.
“There have been incidences of genocide since, whether Rwanda or Biafra or Cambodia, so we haven’t learned the lesson very well,” Schudrich said. “But it doesn’t mean we stop trying to learn the lesson.”
Photo By Bosyantek (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons